TUSCALOOSA - Alabama Coach Nick Saban said rogue agents were "pimps" when he spoke in July at SEC Media Days about Crimson Tide star defensive end Marcell Dareus attending an agent-related party in May in Miami.

Now the word has come out that then-North Carolina assistant coach John Blake called Dareus this summer to recommend an agent.

Saban did not seem interested in stirring the water this time, and he snapped when asked if he is not going to call Blake a pimp.

"First of all, I don't know anything about this," Saban said Monday of a story that Yahoo! Sports reported late Sunday night.

"Secondly, to me, it's water that's been under the bridge for several months now. It's somewhere down in the Gulf of Mexico now. I really don't have much care about talking about that.

"I have a tremendous amount of respect for the honesty, integrity and professionalism of what we do as coaches, and if somebody does something to violate that, everybody can make their judgment as to what that is."

A follow-up question noted that Saban made a big deal about the issue of rogue agents.

"Yeah, the agents," he said. "I'm not going to comment on coaches that do things that they have been accused of doing. I don't really know anything about this. I haven't thought about it. It's not important to me. I'm worried about South Carolina. So if you want to talk about that, we'll talk about that. But I'm not really going to talk about this anymore."

John Blake is not a pimp?

"Is that South Carolina?" Saban said. "I guess I must stutter. Did I stutter? I'm not very clear on how I articulate. Maybe I need to go back to West Virginia and get some more hillbilly slang and maybe everybody can understand me a little better."

An Alabama investigation revealed that Dareus made two May trips to Miami. For violations of NCAA preferential treatment and agent benefits rules, he was suspended for the first two games of the season and had to pay $1,787.17 of benefits to a charity of his choice.

The NCAA student-athlete reinstatement staff reduced the suspension from a potential four games to two because of mitigating circumstances in the case, an NCAA news release said at the time. The Yahoo! Sports story said Dareus told NCAA investigators that Blake was pushing the player to sign eventually with Gary Wichard.

The NCAA and the North Carolina Secretary of State office are investigating Blake and Wichard to determine how much agent tampering there has been at a few college football programs, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

North Carolina defensive lineman Marvin Austin is a central figure in the investigation. When he made a recruiting visit to North Carolina, Dareus met Austin and stayed in touch. Blake was the UNC assistant coach who recruited Dareus when he was a star at Birmingham's Huffman High School.